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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29687460">here in the after it’s bittersweet</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/findingkairos'>findingkairos</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>to you I gift the end of things [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Antarctic Empire, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Immortals AU, Mild Angst, Philza Minecraft-centric (Dream SMP), Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Technoblade-centric (Dream SMP), Winged Philza Minecraft (Dream SMP), Winged Technoblade (Dream SMP)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 01:48:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,036</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29687460</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/findingkairos</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Centuries after the end, Phil and Techno visit the ruins of the old Antarctic Empire.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Technoblade (Dream SMP) &amp; Philza Minecraft (Dream SMP)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>to you I gift the end of things [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104326</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>653</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>here in the after it’s bittersweet</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>(<i>a moment of quiet in the dust</i> — I don’t mind where we’re going if it’s with you)</p><p> </p><p>So.... how about that confirmation about immortal/old Philza, everyone?</p><p>I speedran this fic after hearing about it (as of writing this, I haven't been able to sit down and watch the VODs myself just yet).</p><p>This is hot off the press. Please excuse any typos; I'll fix them in the morning. &lt;3</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The ice is different.</p><p>The citadel has fallen into disrepair, and it’s visible even from the outside. A part of Phil wants to be surprised by that, but the fact is, he’s not—it’s been years since anyone’s inhabited these old walls, after all, let alone since they’ve visited.</p><p>“How long have we been gone?” Techno hums from next to him. He’s wearing his cloak again—for the nostalgia, he’d insisted, but Phil watches the chrysanthemum crest glint in the Antarctic sun as they peer down the hidden shaft that serves as one of the many entrances into the citadel. The embroidery is still good, still tightly woven and glinting with magic, but he hasn’t seen it in years, either, and the sight of it makes something ache in him.</p><p>“I don’t quite remember,” Phil says, and turns away to eye the landscape instead of dwelling on it. The ice is different, but that’s what happens after centuries of melting and re-freezing. It’s a little softer, maybe; the weather cycle must have shifted while they’d been gone.</p><p>“Man, it has to have been at least three centuries? Maybe four.” Techno puts a foot on top of the stone, then both. He stands balanced on the edge for a moment, and it’s a familiar sight, with Techno in his old robes and the old cloak and that same old grin. “Ready for a blast from the past?”</p><p>It hadn’t even been Techno who’d wanted to come out here. It had been Phil, and anyway Techno’s right—at least someone should remember the people and the history, let alone the building itself. And there are memories down there that Phil knows they’d left behind, the first time they’d left with every intention to come back and yet hadn’t.</p><p>“Ready,” Phil says, and when Techno jumps down the shaft he follows him down.</p><p>It’s a familiar jump; the wind rushes past, cold by the speed and the temperatures here both, and Phil remembers the timing by muscle memory alone. Four seconds, five, and there’s the first lantern that marks the level—old and rusted, but the soulfire still burns.</p><p>Phil watches two more lanterns go by before he snaps out his wings and slows his fall, and then the shaft opens up into the heart of their Antarctic citadel.</p><p>It looks—almost like how Phil remembers it. The stone walls are still there, and so is the creaking door and the soulfire lanterns scattered throughout the sloping walls of the cavern, but the wooden bridge has long since rotted and left the two halves of the citadel unconnected.</p><p>That’s fine. Phil has his wings, of course, and Techno’s taken his chest piece off for this.</p><p>He watches Techno’s back, because his wings are always a treat to see. The cloak is in the way but there are slits in it—and oh, it’s been so long since Phil has seen those, too—and Techno’s wings unfurl from them like blooming flower petals.</p><p>“You’re feathered today?” Phil comments, because that’s a <em>rare</em> treat. Techno matches him—where Phil’s are wine-dark and shaded white towards the tips as they catch stardust at the ends of his wings, Techno’s are the inverse, a gradient from ice-blue at the shoulders to a navy-blue wingtip.</p><p>“Felt like it,” Techno says, hovering. The smile he sends Phil is mischievous. “Didn’t want you to feel lonely by having dragon wings, old man.”</p><p>“If <em>I’m</em> old, what does that make you?”</p><p>“Still sprightly enough to be faster than you,” Techno snickers, and oh, it’s on.</p><p>They race each other around the crags of the citadel, darting through openings in the stone where the wooden doors have rotted away, swinging around hallways and their dusted-over paintings, barreling off balconies that drop into the core of the world far below.</p><p>Techno leads them on a chase, and it’s a tour, and it’s a rush of a nostalgia trip all in one. Phil lets him, because this easier than walking through these bare halls and hearing their steps echo. In the air there’s just the cold, and the ice, and the gray smear of stone rush by as Techno finds them interesting obstacles to fly around.</p><p>But eventually they hit the heart of the cavern. Phil remembers this, too. He folds his wings and bleeds speed off with a running landing; Techno takes a moment to hover in the air above him. His sightline’s elsewhere. Phil follows it to see where he’s looking at, but there’s just stone and dust and wood and cold air.</p><p>“Remember this?” Techno calls down to him, and drops to a dead landing next to Phil.</p><p>Phil swats him on the shoulder without thinking about it, his own knees twinging in sympathetic pain. “Oi, what was that for?”</p><p>“You know you’re not supposed to do that.”</p><p>“Not all of us have old bones,” Techno scoffs, ignoring the fact that he’s shaking out his ankles.</p><p>Phil shakes his head, because this is an old argument, and anyway Phil’s the adrenaline junkie of the two of them.</p><p>“Oh,” Techno says, and Phil looks up, alarmed, one hand on his sword, he hadn’t spotted any monsters on his spot-check upon entering the room but something might have crawled out of the dilapidated walls—</p><p>But no. Techno is just running a hand over the chests on the far side of the room, pulling it away with a palmful of dust.</p><p>“Remember this?” he asks again, but this time he points to the crafting table, the tattered old bookshelf, the little area where Phil had once set up a sugarcane generator. “This was where we started, way back when.”</p><p>Back on their first day together on this world, after finding the citadel and tossing ideas back and forth about what to make of this place. “I remember,” Phil says, and watches Techno make a circuit throughout the room. He walks by the old windows that had been there when they’d discovered the stronghold, the back wall where they’d hung up the first banner of the Antarctic Empire that one of their citizens had crafted—</p><p>And the little hole in the wall that Phil remembers all too well.</p><p>“Remember <em>that</em>?” Phil asks, and smiles when Techno lifts his head from where he’s kneeling. The expression on Techno’s face is wry. “I was right then, and I’m right now—you <em>always</em> have a stash.”</p><p>“You don’t have to tell it to me,” Techno huffs, and presses the little button hidden in the hole. “You know you always have access to it.”</p><p>Well, that’s true if the years of living and working together have proved anything, but Phil never likes to <em>assume </em>it. Still. It’s—good to hear it from Techno again. No matter how many times Phil hears it, he thinks—hopes—it will never get old.</p><p>It’s proof that they’ve been around each other so long, too, that when Techno stands up he brushes shoulders with Phil, draping one wing behind Phil’s back, as they watch the redstone work its magic.</p><p>The far wall of this little room where the Empire had began shivers, then starts sinking into the floor. Dust rains from the ceiling as mechanisms that haven’t been disturbed in years start to work again, and Phil closes his eyes to better hear the low rumbling of the citadel.</p><p>There’s the clack, and the crack, and the low thud as the vault wall settles into the floor.</p><p>Techno’s voice is soft when he asks, “You ready for this?”</p><p>Phil swallows, and then inhales, and can almost taste the fresh-baked bread and lamb stew on the back of his tongue. “Have to be, don’t I?”</p><p>Techno keeps his wing draped around Phil’s back as they walk into the vault together, hand-in-hand.</p><p>It is, of course, just as they’d left it. Weapons line the walls, with armor on display stands beneath, still glittering with the night-dark and star-bright enchantments that Phil remembers. He rubs a thumb over the line of runes gilding the edges. “Protection?”</p><p>“On the inside,” Techno rumbles from beside him, leaning his weight into Phil. “Outside’s the decorative bits, remember?”</p><p>For that small bait-and-switch Techno had liked to play, so that no one who’d spotted them on the battlefield could read the magic cast on their armors. Phil hums in remembrance, and the armor echoes him, note for note in a higher octave.</p><p>“You think it’s still viable?”</p><p>“Well, it <em>has</em> been a good few centuries.” Techno peers at the runes with him. “There’s been a few advancements—Jabber’s grandkids sent me a paper on it the other day—but the core of it is probably still good.”</p><p>“Or we can upgrade it.” The items here in the vault are the things that they’d wanted to keep safe, and the stuff it’s made of is netherite. It’ll still be sturdy enough for a re-enchantment, if that’s what they need to do.</p><p>“We can take it with us when we leave.”</p><p>Phil runs his fingers over the filigree winding from shoulder to clavicle, lingers on the prismatic sun carved into the heart. Oh, they’d been so proud of the Empire then, hadn’t they? And for good reason.</p><p>“Do you think the flag is still on the north pole?”</p><p>Techno hums a little in thought, and this time the weapons on the walls sing back. “Probably. We can check—it’s a straight flight north from the western city, I think.”</p><p>“Sounds good.” And then slowly, carefully—steeling his heart, holding his breath—Phil turns to look at the rest of the room.</p><p>Techno’s solid presence beside him had been enough to distract him from the two walls not covered by armor or weapon, and his wings are big enough that they’d disrupted his peripheral vision anyway. But Phil can run away from the past for only so long, and that’s one-half of the reason they’re here in the first place.</p><p>“I wonder what they’d think of us,” Phil asks Techno, leaning a head against his friend’s shoulder, staring at the portraits and the maps.</p><p>Phil can feel the rumble of Techno’s chest beneath his head; if he’d turned it just a little, he could press an ear to the clavicle of his friend, listen to his heart.</p><p>“I think they’d be happy we kept going.”</p><p>“You think?” Phil ducks in closer, and Techno lets him; the draping wing becomes a hug, a feathered blanket pulled up to Phil’s shoulders.</p><p>The hum is loud beneath his ear, now, rumbling in Techno’s ribcage: “You remember Wilbur? The original Wilbur, I mean?”</p><p>“Of course I do.”</p><p>“Remember what he told us, before we left?”</p><p>It takes Phil a moment to remember. It has been centuries, worlds, wars and entire lifetimes since they’d been standing in this very room, thinking of men long dead and gone.</p><p>But Wilbur’s line is the one that Philza had married into and watched over, just as Calvin and TapL and a handful of other warrior’s are the ones that Technoblade had kept an eye on, and Phil remembers what that first Wil had said well enough. “Live long and prosper.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Techno inhales, and it expands his lungs, and it’s a rush of air like the wild winds through valleys. He exhales, and it’s the whisper of the sea. “Yeah.”</p><p>Phil knows what point he’s trying to make. Still doesn’t mean he can make it easy for Techno, though. “We left for a good three hundred years, mate.”</p><p>“And change, don’t forget the change.”</p><p>“Three hundred years and change is still roughly three hundred years.”</p><p>“Nah, Phil, you gotta be accurate about the numbers. For the history books, if nothing else!”</p><p>For the history books, because they are the only ones who remember the Antarctic Empire and this planet as it had been, instead of what their descendants wish they would be. Phil turns to press his forehead against Techno’s shoulder.</p><p>And Techno, bless him, doesn’t question it. He just brings up his other wing so that he’s bracketing Phil, blocking out the world, hiding him from the portraits on the walls with their accusing stares.</p><p>“Did we, though?”</p><p>“What?” Phil’s feathery world says. It shifts, but it’s just Techno resettling on his feet, digging in his heels for the long haul. “Live long? We sure did.”</p><p>Phil swats him again, lightly, just a little. Techno doesn’t even waver. “No, I mean prosper. We just kinda… wandered, for a while. Didn’t set down any roots. Raise any cities anywhere else. The Empire was our last big project.”</p><p>“Well, the Empire was somethin’ else.” Techno hums again, a five-note melody, and the very walls of this vault and the armory hum it back. “Don’t think it’s fair to compare it to anything else we’ve done.”</p><p>That… is true. They’d conquered the server world from the south to the north, a creeping spread like ink that had been inevitable. Countries had fallen; cities had sworn themselves to the chrysanthemum crest. And then afterwards, he and Techno had just—tidied up, handed governance over to their Empire’s council, and left.</p><p>“You were the one just talking about history, and keeping it preserved.”</p><p>“Well, yeah.” Techno sighs, low and quiet, and it rustles Phil’s hair. It feels nice, if ticklish. “But Wil knew that we weren’t—happy, here.”</p><p>After a certain point in time, the Empire had become less about exploration or combat or the excitement of throwing yourself into a challenge and coming out on top, and more—governance. Keeping things stable. Keeping things whole. And that’s true. It had been three centuries ago but standing here, in the citadel where everything had began, in the room where everything had ended—</p><p>“That’s why you wrote that,” Phil says, and doesn’t say any more.</p><p>Techno knows what he means, anyway. His breathing doesn’t hitch but it’s battle-even now, in the calm before the rolling storm.</p><p>“I was getting tired,” Phil’s best friend tells him, with the lowly simmering rage of someone who forgives slights but never forgets. “And I know you were too, don’t lie to me.”</p><p>Phil turns his head, but Techno’s still got his wings concealing them from the world, and the underside is shimmering with cave dust. They’re going to have to preen later, try and get some of that out before it starts itching.</p><p>Techno drops his chin to the top of Phil’s head. Right, he’d been asked a question, and it’s not one he wants to think about, but—it’s Techno. He deserves an answer.</p><p>“I was,” Phil breathes out, a secret for the two of them, and the weight sluices off his shoulders like ice from rooftops. “They were starting to <em>ask</em> things of us, and I love Wil and Wilbur’s line, I do, but—”</p><p>He stops there, because saying it makes it real, and it’s unfair to the memory of Wilbur and it’s unfair to the rest of his kids and grandkids.</p><p>“He didn’t want you to be miserable,” Techno murmurs. “Kinda three hundred years too late to be having doubts, if he had any, Phil.”</p><p>And that’s morbid but that’s Techno, all deadpan humor that never fails, and Phil snorts despite himself. If it’s a little wet and if his eyes are tearing up—well, that’s just the dust.</p><p>“Same way he didn’t want you to write a <em>tombstone</em> for yourself, stars <em>above</em>,” Phil manages to get out, because if Techno is going to be like this then two can play at this game.</p><p>He can feel the rumble through the top of his skull and down his spine, too, as Techno laughs. “I dunno, I think it was pretty funny.”</p><p>“Not when you practically faked your own death for it!”</p><p>“Half the Empire didn’t believe it, and the other half thought it was an elaborate set-up for another conquering.”</p><p>Well. In hindsight, that <em>had</em> been funny.</p><p>“And now?” Phil nudges his head up, and smiles into Techno’s throat when he grumbles good-naturedly at the jostling. “You enjoyed the last three hundred years?”</p><p>“Don’t take that tone with me, Phil. You enjoyed messin’ with them.”</p><p>He had, and now they’re back, retracing their steps. Seeing where they’d started. The Antarctic Empire had built them a reputation, one they’d kept with blood and bloodshed, and it’s—almost nostalgic, being back here again.</p><p>Techno knocks their heads together, gently, affectionately. “This one wasn’t a stash, towards the end.”</p><p>“More like a vault. I wonder where else I’ve seen those?”</p><p>“I’m telling you,” Techno snickers, and it’s light, it’s fond, they’re not weighed down by the past again. “It’s a delight, seeing their faces when you reveal the vault for the first time.”</p><p>“I think you gave everyone you ever lured into your lair a heart attack. Three walls full of skulls, Techno?”</p><p>“You say that like you didn’t help me gather half of it.”</p><p>Phil twists around so that he can peer up at Techno from an angle, incredulous. “You’re the one with the dramatic tendencies.”</p><p>“Touché.”</p><p>Techno puts his hands on Phil’s elbows and gently turns them around. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows <em>Phil</em> knows what he’s doing, but—he’s right. It’s been three hundred years. Maybe it’s time to let this go.</p><p>When Techno pulls away a wing—not both, just one, enough for Phil to see the room—they’re looking at the weaponry on the wall again.</p><p>“Did you want to take anything here?” Techno rumbles next to him. “I was thinkin’ we could take all the weapons and armor, maybe one of the tapestries.”</p><p>The vault is big, twice the size of the one they’d built on a server they’d withered to oblivion, but it still feels small. “Let’s do that,” Phil says, and watches as Techno raises a hand. “Take everything and run?”</p><p>Something they haven’t done since before they’d built the Empire, before they’d become legends, before they’d figured out that they could never die. Techno grins at him, eyes wild, hair rising with static electricity, one wing around Phil’s back, the other flared out.</p><p>The hum of the room grows louder, then louder.</p><p>“You know it,” Techno says, and then he fills the room with light.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This story is part of the <a href="https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject">LLF Comment Project</a>, which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:</p><ul>
<li>Short comments</li>
<li>Long comments</li>
<li>Questions</li>
<li>“&lt;3” as extra kudos</li>
<li>Reader-reader interaction</li>
</ul><p><a href="https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta">LLF Comment Builder</a> </p><p>  <b>This author sees and appreciates all comments but may not reply due to exhaustion and anxiety.</b></p><p>If you don’t want a reply, for any reason (sometimes I feel shy when I’m reading and not up to starting a conversation, for example), feel free to sign your comment with “-whisper” and I will appreciate it but not respond!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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